Gaston the Magnificent (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
braggadocious) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
souljammed2017-05-11 08:38 pm
braggadocious) wrote in souljammed2017-05-11 08:38 pm
Questions & TL;DR Meme
1. Post a list of your characters.
2. Ask other people questions. Whatever comes into your head! Headcanon, things you don't know about their actual canon, CR related things, future plot plans - anything is game.
3. Maybe possibly receive tl;dr type answers.
4. ???
5. Profit.
1/???
So the short part of this is that I'm not entirely sure where Bro is going to swing, mostly because Bro can be so volatile and is from a volatile place in canon. I'm pretty loose with character plans in general. Lucifer I'm swinging wherever at the moment and should probably have a more stable idea of. Pokey I've probably got the most definite plans for. Bro I have ideas where he's gonna wander, but nothing entirely concrete yet.
So. A big part of where Bro is right now is super shitty because Bro's personal mantra and worldview are exceedingly self-defeating and destructive. You are either a winner or loser. You go big or go home. In his case, Bro just got taken fucking downtown by Bec Noir in a super embarrassing way, so according to his own worldview - which he's entrenched in himself for years - he is a masterclass in being a punkass bitch who just got knocked down a peg. That means that Bro's self-esteem is at the lowest it could possibly be - and being Dirk Strider his self-esteem is never high to begin with - as well as the fact that he feels he needs to reassert that he is, in fact, The Man (TM).
A lot of that is why he was so quick to try and 'assert' himself in regards to Dirk. The truth is, Bro feels much the same way that Dirk feels about him: he regards Dirk as possibly a threat both to Dave and to his own sense of identity. He sees in Dirk a younger, more naive and hopefully him. He kind of wants to squash that shit. It's not really a hostile squashing (at first) understand; he sincerely felt he'd be doing Dirk a favor if he could make him even more jaded. You can't trust people, you can only trust yourself and family. Despite the image of "asshole" that Bro makes sure to project (and quite frankly, it's not really a projection; Bro Strider is quite the fucking asshole), Bro's not even doing it because he dislikes people. "Don't trust others to do what you can do yourself" is just a mantra and common sense. The more you let people in, the more they kind of take from you both with their expectations of you and your expectations of them. Trying to drill in that people are stupid motherfuckers, so don't have expectations for them, was to Bro a kindness he could do this kid. Trying to help these motherfuckers seemed stupid to him, not because he actively wants harm to happen to them but because he feels you can't really help someone who won't help themselves first or who are dumb as shit.
On a side note, there actually is a reason I chose to use a generic icon for Bro throughout his conversation with Dirk. A part of it was because I thought that during most private conversations, Bro would do his damnedest to produce an air that would show rage but wouldn't allow any other emotion to mix in. I tried to emulate that by not using icons that displayed emotion. Another part of it is that, quite honestly, Bro treated his conversation with Dirk more as a monologue than any real dialogue. He gets that Dirk is an alternate him. He gets there will be differences. Part of him is still convinced that with how all the weird time and ecto shit works in Sburb, Dirk can't be that different from him. This has led him to conclude that on at least some issues and instances Dirk is flat out lying to or deceiving him, but we'll get to that in a bit.
Anyway, the conversation gave him what he felt he'd been sorely lacking since his fight with Bec and getting here: a sense of control. It took him for-fucking-ever to actually piece together what the hell was going on with this town and the posters he found in the maid cafe (information that was, similarly, given to him in full by Dirk). He wanted to treat Dirk in many ways as a mini-him, and tried to predict what Dirk was doing based on the idea that Dirk and he were going to understand each other and have the same general kind of not necessarily disdain, but low point of view of other people. After all, he could tell that, just like him, Dirk was for the most part alone.
There's key differences there though. Dirk Strider was alone because humanity was gone, whereas Bro Strider was alone through self-imposed choice. Not only that, but Dirk Strider is aware he is not just alone, but lonely. Bro is also immensely lonely, but hasn't allowed himself to be aware of this.
So Bro's decision to think of Dirk as mini-him came to a pretty shitty head when Bro and Kakyoin had a fist fight in the middle of a fucking hospital hall. So in all honesty, Bro didn't really give a fuck about the list for the most part. He didn't - and still doesn't - really have anything against the people on the list. He was just told they're dangerous, keep an eye on them, and that was what he was going to do. Again differences. The key idea for Dirk was treating them as people, while acknowledging they could be problematic. The key idea for Bro was acknowledging they could conceivably be dangers, and they were dangers because that's just what people are. He expected that this was the same way Dirk viewed it, and that Dirk had much more interest in the scheme than he did the people. He thought that Dirk honestly wouldn't have told Kakyoin, his friend here, about this scheme because Bro never would have had anyone (save Lil Cal) that he would have told this shit too.
It was a pretty massive miscalculation.
For one, Bro honestly didn't expect it to come to violence, and still blames the fact that it did come to actual violence on Kakyoin for throwing the first punch, never mind the fact that Bro was verily visibly threatening at least five people in a shitty way. To Bro, it was just shittalk, despite how it looked, because Bro is shit at gauging most normal people. The list didn't really mean anything to him on a personal scale, and it wasn't actual personal about any of the people on it. He was just getting the dirt because hey, it was conceivable them fucks could be dangerous. In a lot of ways, Bro way have managed to actually save some face and avoided a lot of stupid bullshit if he actually talked to Dirk when Dirk showed in the hall, but naw. Bro wasn't bending knee to anybody at that point, because yet again he'd been embarrassed. It wasn't even by someone who should have; it was by a nineteen year old kid. Most adults would probably understand how atrocious it looked that a thirty something tried to beat the shit out of a nineteen year old with a sword; Bro didn't. He just saw this as no longer his problem because shit had gone wrong and he wasn't going to deal with it now because his control was crumbling further.
Needless to say, things did not get better. When Dirk did his call out post after the boss fight, Bro spent most of it trolling because it was the easiest way he could see to try and erode Dirk's patience, authority, and own sense of control at the time. Fuck this kid for acting differently then he himself would; the dude is clearly lying and playing some bigass games that are going to get his ass burnt, as well as possibly Dave's. It also just hurt his pride to see that Dirk didn't react how he thought he would, and chipped at his sense of identity. It got at it's worst when Bro tried to bait Mettaton into admitting what he'd done to piss people off, mostly again because he was curious more than actually making a thing about it. That Dirk decided to jump in surprised him yet again, but didn't hurt him. Dirk's last line about how all Dave was had nothing to do with Bro? That hurt. Dave was pretty much Bro's magnum fucking opus, his little bro and his testament to the world that he himself was not a fuck up because he raised such a rocking little brother. To deny Bro any part of making Dave who he was, to sharpening his edges, was similar to denying Bro's identity, the part of his identity he truly did give a shit about, entirely.
He was really just fucking with Dirk at that point because he was mad. That? That was a declaration of war.
Okay I gotta be heading out and have no idea how fucking long this shit'll be in whole but I'll continue when I get home. Like I said this is a novel and we got a lot to explore in order to explain where Bro is and why he's doing what he is before I can begin to talk about where he's going cause I need to get thoughts collected. Understand there's no defense of Bro in this piece. Bro is a massive, huge asshole. It is, however, an explanation of the man.